The Inaccessible Inner Life of Wakefield Essay -- Wakefield Stories Es

The Inaccessible Inner Life of â€Å"Wakefield† â€Å"All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting looking out upon, See, hear, and am silent.† –Walt Whitman We are presented with a piece of gossip of a man named Wakefield who leaves his wife for twenty years to live in a house the next street over. If this story were workshopped in a present-day fiction writing class, it would be argued that this story has interesting elements but is not, as a whole, an interesting story-- that the story lies within Wakefield’s motivation for leaving or within the reaction of Wakefield’s wife upon the return of her presumed-dead husband, or that the point of view ought to be reconsidered in order to tell the full story. Much of contemporary fiction attempts to tell the story that satisfies the collective urge to know another human being entirely, to finally understand another person’s story. The story of â€Å"Wakefield,† however, admits in the Puritan vein that the story we all want to know is actually unknowable, and can only be imagined. Through examining the whims of others in fiction, the meaning that can be extracted, however universal it may seem coming from the voice of the narrator, is in the end a projection out of our own selves. â€Å"Wakefield† is not about the narrator, the curious plotline, or even about Wakefield himself. â€Å"Wakefield† is about the telling of these things. The first sentence presents the entire plot of â€Å"Wakefield,† obtained from â€Å"some old magazine or newspaper,† stating from the beginning that the story that follows is not only based on heresy but is, in fact, entirely heresy itself. Why would a reader continue reading when the ending is spoiled in the first line and the story is admittedl... ...ng in our lives, and we prove it by finding meaning in his. With his grand conclusion, the narrator warns us that if you step outside the norms of a system, you may become the Outcast of the Universe. But what is it that really makes Wakefield the Outcast of the Universe? Perhaps every man is the Outcast of the Universe when the community attempts to interpret his whims. Why write a story that cannot be told? Why read a story that cannot be told? To feel as though one can tell a story, that one can read a story and be one with a narrator, to feel united, and yet to know, on some level, that we all are Outcasts of the Universe. It is both terrifying and comforting to realize that the community, united and whole, in which we pretend to reside, is in fact a faà §ade for the community of outcasts that struggle to find meaning in one another in order to survive.